Apologies if this is in the wrong forum - I couldn't decide which forum would be most appropriate.

Hoping someone here can point me in the right direction as my email to directcanada went unanswered and when I phoned after holding for 45 mins and not moving up a single place in line I gave up and registered here :)
/endrant

We have a small conference room here at work where many meetings are held, and the taking of minutes at those meetings is becoming a nightmare, so we're thinking of purchasing some voice recognition software (currently looking at Dragon Naturally Speaking)
The sticking point for us is that we need a microphone which is powerful enough to pick up and record voices from around the room and translate them to text via the voice recognition software.

If anyone here has experience with that type of setup and could point me in the right direction it'd be greatly appreciated.

As far as getting the software to work.... I'm thinking it's probably not there yet. A quick google search will get you quite a few links to papers discussing the issues relating to getting voice recognition software to work with several different (and sometimes simultaneous) voice patterns.

The best you're probably going to be able to get is to make a recording of the meetings, and then have somebody transcribe them afterwards. (This is why stenos get paid the big bucks.... :) ).

It is available it is just not quite there yet. If you consider just the difference in one persons voice saying one word from day to day. Dragon is mostly used for one person. You would train the software to recognize certain patterns and traits inherent to you voice. This would make the software much more accurate. You could possibly. record the meeting and run the tape through voice recognition software. This might be a better approach then using a mic.
Too much background voice, directional problems. -People moving when speaking. The software is worlds better then it used to be but it still does have a long way to go. Good luck. BTW, Dragon is a very expensive piece of software.